I learned first hand what a Derecho is this weekend. After the storm I was left with no power and high temperatures close to 100 degrees. It was not a comfortable day on Saturday in Maryland.

To make things worse BGE gave me some very unhelpful information about when my power would come back. All went dark at about 11 pm on Friday night. When I woke up early on Saturday and called to report the outage BGE told me they expected power would be restored to my house by 8:30 am. 8:30 came and went and the power stayed off throughout my neighborhood.

Throughout the day I got used to the automated call prompts telling me my power would be back at 1 pm, then 5 pm, then 8:30 pm, then 1 am. My power finally came back up at about 8 am on Sunday morning. All these estimates that seemed to have no basis in reality really pissed me off. I would have rather gotten one vague "we're working on it and don't know when power will be back".

To any companies out there providing this sort of information please don't provide an estimate for something that isn't going to be met. All it does if frustrate and annoy your customers.